Dr. Jayaseelan Raj

Biography

Jayaseelan Raj is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at King's College London, focusing on International Development. Before joining King's, he was a professor at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies (CeMIS) at the University of Göttingen in Germany. He previously served as an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Development Studies in India and was a postdoctoral research fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Raj has contributed significantly to the field of social anthropology, holding a PhD from the University of Bergen in Norway. His research interests include plantation systems, agrarian change, social inequality, discrimination, racial capitalism, identity, citizenship, and social movements, particularly in the context of economic crises in the Global South. He conducts ethnographic research on agrarian industrial transformations in South India. His recent publications include the book 'Plantation Crisis: Ruptures in Dalit Life in the Indian Tea Belt' (UCL Press, 2022) and the co-authored work 'Ground Down: Tribe, Caste, and Class Inequality in 21st Century India' (Pluto Press, 2017; Oxford University Press, 2018). His articles and commentaries have been featured in esteemed journals such as JRAI, the Journal of Agrarian Change, and Critique of Anthropology.

Research Interests

Courses